Does anyone here know German?

[Valen]

I just got an email in German, from someone who appears to want to buy the game but doesn't know English (maybe can't read the order form). Babel Fish did a pretty shabby job of translating. If anyone knows German and can translate, can you please PM me? Thanks in advance.

[patrox]

Another good reason to use plimus ;) ( multilingual forms )

pat.
ps : i don't know german unfortunately

[Valen]

Well if that's the problem I can just send him to the RegNow form which has support for German. :p But yeah, sure, Plimus sounds like it's pretty good. :)

[kerchen]

Yeah, send him a link to your German RegNow page. If he still can't figure it out, English may not be the only thing he doesn't understand. :)

[Valen]

Ok I sent him a reply. I just wish Babel Fish could translate grammar better. It seems to try to do a direct translation of each word, which often is not enough to understand a sentence. To make things worse, some words don't exist in some languages, and then it tries to do a closest match, and that can get confusing too. Looks like there's money to be made in developing an automated intelligent translation system.

[Greg Squire]

Google has some tools to automatically translate a web page (http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en). However it probably won't do any better than Babel Fish. (Obviously this won't translate text that is in any graphics.)

It seems odd that someone who doesn't understand English, would want to buy an English only game. Though after looking at your game Brickster, I see that there's very few words, and the game play is intuative, so I could see why for a game that that. However, if there's a lot of words, such as in a text adventure, then I can see them not wanting it.

I don't know that many Indie's have "localized" versions of their game (especially if English is your primary language). I'm not sure how big the markets are outside of English. (I'm sure they exist, but I don't know how big they are in comparison.) Any ideas on this. Is it worth it to make a German, Spanish, French, etc. versions of your game (an of course all marketing versions around that)? Is is worth the hassle? Enlighten me.

[Mike Wiering]

I don't know that many Indie's have "localized" versions of their game (especially if English is your primary language). I'm not sure how big the markets are outside of English. (I'm sure they exist, but I don't know how big they are in comparison.) Any ideas on this. Is it worth it to make a German, Spanish, French, etc. versions of your game (an of course all marketing versions around that)? Is is worth the hassle? Enlighten me. I think it certainly helps. All my games are in English and in Dutch and I sell quite a few here in Holland (more than any other single country, except USA sometimes). But I'm not sure if that is only because of the language (everyone here also speaks/understands English). Dutch people might be more confortable ordering from a Dutch company, besides I have made it easier for them to pay directly by bank (which is much more common here than paying by credit card or check) and I've probably had much more exposure from magazines here than anywhere else in the world.

BTW Valen, if you still need a translation, PM me and I'll give it a try (here in Holland, they teach English, French and German at school).

[Mithril Studios]

I am literate in german, and my wife is a native. Feel free to PM me with the info and I'll be more than happy to translate both the sender's email and your reply.

Anthony

[Valen]

Thanks guys. I already got help with the translation. Didn't realize so many people here know German!